If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Voodoo 5 alternatives?

A couple days ago i decided that a voodoo 5 would be the card that would be best for me. That was until i heard 3dfx was dead. So now that getting a voodoo 5 would be dumb because of a lack of future driver support, what card should i get for a low end system. All i need to know about is a card that doenst rely heavily on the processor (p2 350). Im curious, hows the 32mb radeon ddr.

Hey I'd still get the V5 5500 if I were you! Don't worry about driver updates all that much. The drivers we have right now for the V4/V5 are excellent and I'm sure that Nvidia will keep the 3dfx driver team going. Even if they don't the current drivers work great.

Forget Voodoo people. According to all the benchmark numbers the latest Voodoo 5 doesnt even stack up to the first Geforce video card. And compared to the Geforce2 it plain SUCKS! 3D Mark 2000 scores the Voodoo 5 about half as good as the low end Geforce 2 models.

Forget Voodoo people. According to all the benchmark numbers the latest Voodoo 5 doesnt even stack up to the first Geforce video card. And compared to the Geforce2 it plain SUCKS! 3D Mark 2000 scores the Voodoo 5 about half as good as the low end Geforce 2 models.

3DMark 2000 is biased towards Nvidia cards dude! Real life gaming performance can't be judged by just running one benchmarking program. Are their benchmarking programs for image quality and card stability/compatiblity? No, but if their was the V5 5500 would blow the competition away!

Sincerely,

Best4x4

P.S. And the FSAA on the V5 5500 is at least usefull in 2x. FSAA on any Nvidia card is a joke. The only thing you can do on a Nvidia based card is play the game in a higher resolution vs using FSAA.

Creator you seem to have all sorts of problems with just about every piece of hardware out there for the modern PC don't you? Yes 3DMark 2000 is biased towards Nvidia cards. And no it isn't a true benchmarking program to find out the actual gaming performance of any certain video card.

I for one think you should trade in your PC for a Macintosh G3/G4 and be done with it.

Creator, I wouldn't say that 3DMark2000 is deliberately biased towards nVidia. I'd say that it's just a very poorly designed benchmark, bearing no resemblance whatsoever with ANY real game, and which (totally by accident) happens to favour nVidia cards.

Lemme explain why.

1) For starters, it uses huge numbers of polygons. Even the medium quality "game" tests push ludicriously high numbers of polgons, compared to any actual game, existing or currently in the making.

2) It uses very little texturing power. For starters, most of the rendering is done in vertex lighting mode, which means it's mostly a single-texturing application. (That's why, for example, it has put the S3 Savage2000 at an artifficial disadvantage vs the GeForce SDR.) Most actual modern games (e.g., Q3A, to quote another T&L enabled title) use lightmaps, and a ludicrious ammount of multi-texturing. According to John Carmack (you may have heard of him ) the Q3A engine can use up to 8-10 textures per polygon.

3) The default test is in 16 bit colour. Which, combined with the mostly single texture use, doesn't even come close to stressing the memory bandwidth even on a SDR card, much less on a DDR one. (That's why, for example, the GeForce SDR and the MX score so high, when in practice you'll get a lot less fps with them in Q3A.)

So basically, again, it's just a lousy artifficial benchmark, which doesn't even come close to reflecting any game reality. It tends to stress polygon processing, including their transfer through the AGP bus, WAAAAAY more than the texturing.

For example, according to 3DMark2000, I was MUCH better off with a lower CPU speed, but a higher overclocked AGP bus. Strangely enough, no actual game ever showed the same anomaly. Go figure.